The Speedysnail Gallery Script

I’ve been teaching myself PHP over the past week, and creating a few image gallery scripts along the way—first for the Cartoon Lounge, and then for this part of the site. Since you can’t tell how I did it by looking at my source code, I thought I’d share a version of the script here for anyone who might find it useful. There are other tools around that do the same sort of thing (and much more), but this one is dead simple.

The Ice Age Cometh

End of Days

The latest book by Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, is perfect reading for January; so big and heavy it’s best to be lying down to read it, preferably in bed. Once you start reading you’ll find it’s full of reasons never to get out again, like the fact that the Earth is overdue a cometary collision on the scale of the one that obliterated the dinosaurs with a force of a million billion zillion Hiroshima bombs (the standard ISO unit of interplanetary destruction), or that Yellowstone National Park is sitting on a lake of magma so gigantic that when it blows (which is also overdue) six Western US states will have to be renamed New Pompeii, and the rest of the world will be eating ash for a month.

Nothing you won’t already know from a regular subscription to The Watchtower, then, but there’s something about the way Bryson describes the cruel and unforgiving nature of the universe that makes the utter pointlessness of all human endeavour all the more obvious. Given that A Short History was a bestseller among people looking for heavy books to give relatives at Christmas, it’s only a matter of time before an outbreak of mass nihilism of a kind not seen since the Great, Like, Whatever of 1987.

Aristocratic Anecdotes

The State Governor’s Speech

“The Speech that Ought to be Made by a State Governor After Visiting the Fall Exposition of an Agricultural Society,” from chapter eight of Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy by Stephen Leacock (1915). The text is in the public domain.